Why isn't Congress looking into the great Artichoke Scam?

Who cooked up the idea of eating such things?

by Ken

I mean, is there some secretly all-powerful K Street vegetable cabal scheming to disseminate the horror that is artichokes?

One of the realities I've learned to live with in Food Network programming (and no, I'm not thinking just now of the likelihood that if you turn it on randomly you'll find Guy Fieri screeching at you; I kind of like Guy, actually -- he really does know a lot about food, but they've got him wildly ratcheting up his most unbearable personal qualities) is the compulsive holiday theming.

It's trying even with a traditionally food-intensive holiday like Thanksgiving. I mean, a month of turkey and "sides"? Or Valentine's Day. Much as I love chocolate, two weeks of all-chocolate programming, every damned February, pushes the limits of even the most dedicated chocaholic.

But then there's the annual Easter trough. Easter, if you'll excuse me, is not a food-friendly holiday. You've got your ham, and I guess Easter eggs, and then, and then. . .

Okay, so we've survived Easter. Now, apparently under the pretext of this being spring, this morning both Anne Burrell and Alex Guarnaschelli were futzing with nature's own torture pods, artichokes. For cripes' sake. (I'm coming to have little expectation of wanting to eat much of what Anne cooks. But Alex is such a sweetheart, how can you not want to love her food? Note: no artichokes in sight in the photo.)

It's not just that I hate artichokes, although I do. It's this whole charade of pretending that this disgusting heap of inedible growth is a treat.

Don't you often wonder how certain superficially improbable foodstuffs were first imagined to be edible? Like the potato, for example. In its raw state, who would have imagined that it would be worth a second gastronomic thought? The inspiration that you could cook the thing in all sorts of ways and produce miracles -- genius!

Then there's the artichoke. This goes beyond even those shopworn vegetable hoaxes like broccoli and cauliflower and (cooked) cabbage. Cook one of those suckers, and try to breathe around the fumes it gives off. The very thought of putting something like that in your body -- good grief!

The artichoke, however, is nothing but hassle from the get-go. First you have to hope that the cook has done something, out of sight in the kitchen, with the officially inedible choke (as in arti-choke; shouldn't this have been a hint, people?.) Now you're supposed to sit there peeling those hideous leaves off and dipping them in assorted disgusting sauces so you can scrape off the disgusting underside of each leaf? Only to be "rewarded," eventually, with the "heart" of the thing, a small block of sludge that tastes like it was carved out of the "solid" section of the local toxic-waste dump. Oh, yum!

My junior year in college, I spent a term in France, living with a family in the capital of Lower Normandy. The fine old house on a street corner on the outskirts of town was the very house in which my hostess had grown up. She recalled that during the German occupation in World War II, her father formed a habit of standing out on the corner hurling imprecations at the German soldiers. Eventually a kindly one begged him to go inside so they wouldn't have to do anything about him.

(After the liberation of the city, which between aerial bombardment -- warning leaflets were dropped, but outside of town, so that no one, except probably the Germans, saw them -- and heavy tank and other grueling ground combat was about two-thirds destroyed, the neighbor from across the street, unhinged by the loss of her entire family, came up to her father and screamed, "Well, Monsieur ---------, you have your libération. Are you happy?" My hostess recalled that in November of 1944, always a rainy month in Normandy, it rained every day, when few of even the surviving buildings had roofs.)

On the plus side, my hostess's French fries, cooked twice in the standard French way, were heavenly. On the minus side, periodically she served her family, and me with them, in the guise of a great treat, artichokes. How do you handle a situation where you're being offered what to the offerer is a great treat but which sends your own personal gut into convulsions?

Whoever cooked up the Artichoke Scam, wherever he or she is, must be laughing his or her fool head off.

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